My automated solar rig was recording at about 59 fps when an airliner crossed the full disk in about 0.6 seconds. I didn't know it had happened until my transit detector flagged it afterwards.
This is a reprocessed image showing the turbulence which the lucky imaging algorithm had removed previously.
The plane: Delta flight 2078 (N312DN, an Airbus A321), five minutes into its trip from SFO to Minneapolis. It was climbing through about 10,700 ft, roughly 4.6 km from me, at 311 knots. I identified it by working out its distance from its size against the Sun (the Sun's diameter gives the scale), then matching that against public ADS-B history (adsb.lol). Only one aircraft was in that spot at that moment.
The turbulence: look behind the engines. The hot exhaust bends the light and makes the granulation ripple and swirl, and the wake hangs over the disk for about a second after the plane has gone.
How it's made
The background Sun is a lucky-imaging stack from the same capture run, with my usual colourised processing.
The plane is the real silhouette from each raw frame. Off the disk the raw is just black sky, so I rebuilt the full outline from the frames where it was on the disk and carried it along its straight-line path. That's how it passes over the limb and the prominences.
The exhaust distortion is measured, not added for effect. I compared each raw frame with clean frames from before and after the pass to see how far the light was bent. Normal seeing moves things about 1 px; the wake moves them 3–10+ px. I applied that bending only where it's clearly above seeing.
Gear
Lunt LS60THa
ZWO ASI585MM
Losmandy G11 (shared with my night-time deep-sky rig)
0.71 ms exposures, about 59 fps, 1696×1696 crop
When and where: 11 Oct 2026, 12:36 PT, Walnut Creek, California.
